Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday June 03, 2006 @08:37AM
from the have-those-responsible-been-sacked? dept.

Many readers have submitted news that The Pirate Bay is back online, operating for now as "The Police Bay." Writes one anonymous submitter: "Pirate Bay got new hardware, moved the servers abroad and used recent backups. So the only bad side-effect of this police raid is that hundreds of clients of the ISP PRQ still have not got their servers back from the police. When the police did the raid on Wednesday, they took Pirate Bay from Bankgirot's secure server room. Then they also took all the servers in PRQ colocation facility STH3, effectively disabling a lot of small companies. The connection between PRQ and TPB? - Same owners, nothing more, this is beginning to become a huge scandal in Sweden with coverage on TV and all newspapers 4 days in a row."

So soon they crowed victory, so soon will they be humbled. By the looks of things the takedown of the Pirate Bay was less than legal, and now with the 'Bay back online the MPAA must be feeling more than a little upset. Personally I'm of the view that the Pirate Bay was perfectly legal - they didn't carry any copyrighted works themselves, just as Google don't carry the materials they link to. What fun this whole affair will turn out to be...

Pirate Bay is *more* legal than Google. Google at least exists in this "grey area" -- with things like Google Cache, and things like that, where they actually DO distribute the actual copyrighted content themselves occasionally. Nothing that the Pirate Bay serves up is actually copyrighted, since it's just.torrent files.

Considering last weekend Google Video had a full copy (view and download) of "Fear and Loathing" I'd say they're tied. Hell, at one point it was number 35. I'm sure there was somekind of age-check-before-download (there has to be a single, cool word in German for that) to protect the children from such dangerous thoughts.

One difference between US and Swedish law is that in Sweden even non-commercial copyright infringement is a crime, which means that it is covered by the general rules for being an accessory or an accomplice to crime (Brottsbalken 23:4). This was never conclusively tried by the Swedish Supreme Court in the so-called "BBS case" (NJA 1996 s. 79), where the sysop of a BBS was prosecuted for letting users illegally share software. The reason is that the prosecutor never claimed that the sysop was an accessory or accomplice to acts committed by his user, instead claiming that the sysop was illegally making the software available to the public by letting users download the software from his BBS. The court held that the sysop could not be convicted because there was no act actually performed by the sysop, and because the prosecution hadn't initially claimed he was an accomplice to someone elses copyright infringement the court was unable to consider that possibility due to Swedish trial rules (Rättegångsbalken 30:3, som innebär att domstolen bara kan döma för en gärning som innefattas av åklagarens gärningsbeskrivning).

Hence no one can be totally sure whether The Pirate Bay is legal in Sweden, because the legal precedent is not 100% clear. The question if intent should be very interesting here. While it should be evident that The Pirate Bay is set up with intent that people should be able to use it to commit crimes, the proprietors have no knowledge of what copyright infringement users are going to commit and no direct intent that those specific crimes will be committed.

The claim that Sweden doesn't have laws against "contributory infringement" is wrong, however.

Your analogy sucks balls. The Pirate Bay would be more analogous to a gun distributor, with the actions of gun owners as their own responsibility. And even then the analogy only sucks balls a tiny bit less. In Anarchist Slashdot, balls suck analogies.

You know, ordinarily, police would love it if someone was distributing locations and phone numbers for drug dealers. Why doesn't the *AA thank them for giving them the IP addresses of illegal filesharers?

Not sure what country you are from, but where I am from the police needs evidence. They can not just arrest the owner of the number. They can not even just call him and ask him to sell them some drugs.

In Belgium (where I am from) the cout has stated that it won't go after distributors who just share. It will only go after people who do copyright infrengements for money.

So what would happen is the following. **AA gives the IP to the police. The police brings it to the court and the court drops the case. As this brings unneeded work to the police, they would NOT be happy with it.

The local version of the **AA have tried to bring cases to court and where told to come back when money was exchanged. They also have tried to intimidate providers and some just informed their customers that they MIGHT be doing illegal and that that would be against the AUP. However as long as there is no courtcase, a provider can not give my information to SABAM (the local organisation) and they are not allowed to look wether I am sharing the latest SUSE torrent, a movie I made myself or the movie Daens.

Wrong guess, I'm from the EU. My understading of copyright law in a foreign country a few Km away from me is not that bad, especially when I've been reading a bit about it. What you and your trolling friends refuse to admit is that TPB encourages and facilitates sharing copyrighted material. I will continue to use it no matter what Swedish law says (is it OK, is it not? Like I care...) but I will NOT kid myself into believing that TPB knows nothing about the Windows ISOs you can download thanks to their portal. The post I replied to was trying to get away with a ridiculous technicality which didn't make any sense, that's why I compared to another nonsensical one.

The police raid of TPB (at the direction of the United States) is widely believed to have been illegal under the laws of the country in which the raid took place. Attempting to applying U.S. legal theory to the situation does not magically change the jurisdiction.

Yeah, so what? I don't care about the raid, I am simply pointing out that TPB is happy to help with piracy. They don't host the material, OK. They're in the clear wrt Swedish law, OK. So what? It does not mean you can pretend that piracy does not take place thanks to their portal. Then if their law allows this, more power to them.

Why does the United States and some of its citizens believe respecting the sovereignty of nations is optional?

I don't know, ask an American. In the meantime, were you in favour or against the bombing raids on Milosevic? What do you think of regulating the activity of farmers in my country so that the farmers in yours get a better/worse ROI? And I could make countless examples... Don't believe Europe is immune to this kind of games. The USA are definitely not alone.

I hate to be cynical, but in my area they heavily traffic the interstate until everyone has a ticket for going 3 MPH over the speed limit. Back alleys aren't as profitable so they're not really a concern. =OP

The sole purpose of pirate bay is to facilitate crime,No. Their sole purpose is to host torrent files. Whether those are torrents of copyrighted works or public domain works is not something they consider, they host them either way. So your statement is inaccurate.

Google removes things from the cache, the pirate bay tells people to fuck off.

Quiet, you - it's not criminally illegal, it's rightcopy defringement, or something like that. Yeah. It's in Sweden, and they're pirates, so that makes it absolutely all right. The fact that Sweden's got some odd legal loophole which makes it not a crime to post links to copyrighted material means that it's therefore absolutely not a crime to go ahead and download any of this copyrighted material, laws in the users' native countries be damned. Swedish pirates say what they're doing is fine, so therefore everything else they facilitate is too!

Erm...

Isn't actually downloading anything from such sites still illegal?

I pay for stuff, or do without. It has its advantages, especially with games...;-)

Have you ever considered that it isnt a loophole and just the way the law is supposed to be. They have known about it for a long time, if it were a loophole it would have been "fixed" maybe that country wants it to be that way.

Kind of like Russia and allofmp3.com. Maybe the Russian legislature just wants the law to work that way, they have had ample time and obviously been pressured to fix it, yet have not.

And btw, downloading stuff might very well be illegal for you, but the internet is a global network, which means laws of one country do not apply everywhere, yes yes, I know this is a difficult concept to grasp but it is true.

Gasp! Are you saying that American law isn't the supreme law of the world? Handed down by god himself to the puritans, so that they might convince the entire world of the immorality of nipples, pot, and sharing?

Looks like the Swedish Police is making a free, wide and very positive campaign to favor the Piracy Party. I bet they will be getting a lot more votes thanks to this weird operation. Thank you Swedish police officers!

Yes, their member count has almost doubled. And for the last few day they have gotten about 1000 new members each day.

With the kind of support this incident has raised, they are now likely to enter the swedish parliament in the elections in september.

Although (still) officially denied, it looks like TPB was raided on the direct order of the swedish Minister of Justice, Thomas Bodström, after pressure from MPAA and the US government. This is highly illegal in Sweden, and the leader of the opposition in the swedish parliament has requested an investigation [johanlinander.se].

With the kind of support this incident has raised, they are now likely to enter the swedish parliament in the elections in september.

Any word on how they're doing in the polls? I've just looked at the member stats, which are sort of an open issue, because the smallest party in parlament (Green Party, 247000 votes) just over the 4% margin (225000 votes) has about 7200 members, the pirate party only 5000. The ratio of votes to members seem to vary greatly though, but the Green Party is in the good end. E.g. the central party has 50-80000 members (depending on how you count) and 350000 votes. Since the number is growing so rapidly it's hard to tell, but I wouldn't say "likely" just yet. Then again, this might be the sort of party not that many "publicly" become members for but could vote for on election day. I really wonder what'll happen in september...

So, at what point does it become the responsibility of the police to do enough homework to make sure that their investigation dosen't harm many other businesses that are completely uninvolved in the search for evidence? What recourse do the other effected isp customers have?

So, at what point does it become the responsibility of the police to do enough homework to make sure that their investigation dosen't harm many other businesses that are completely uninvolved in the search for evidence? What recourse do the other effected isp customers have?

a) When hell freezes overb) None

Except in a very few special cases where the police are being accused of having ulterior motives (groundless searches, SLAP-style shutdowns, excessive destruction of property), your recourse is none. Same

Basicly, as long as the police are conducting an legitimate investigation you don't get anything.

According to the Swedish news coverage, there is some legitimate doubts as to whether it was a legitimate investigation or not. Their laws don't make linking to infingements an illegality. As such, since The Pirate Bay didn't host anything that is illegal per Swedish law. Now, it gets even better than this. According to people over there the national police happen to keep whingeing about not having enough manpower, etc. to enforce problems like drug trafficing, etc. and little gets done about real problems- but they can muster 50(!) people to "bust" a place that doesn't do anything illegal per their laws as a result of pressure being put on them from MPAA and others in the US. It's my understanding that there's a lot of people pissed about it over there right now.

Now, it gets even better than this. According to people over there the national police happen to keep whingeing about not having enough manpower, etc. to enforce problems like drug trafficing, etc. and little gets done about real problems- but they can muster 50(!) people to "bust" a place that doesn't do anything illegal per their laws as a result of pressure being put on them from MPAA and others in the US. It's my understanding that there's a lot of people pissed about it over there right now.

Agreed, I'm a Swede and there are problems with police shortage in many cities here. Ours would basically celebrate if we got as few as 10-20 more our way to, you know, handle abuse and rape and drug cases.

To make matters worse, the Swedish police have also earlier said they aren't intending to prioritize these cases too much, which made a lot of sense given the overall situation. Then this happens, where they get 50 officers to arrest 3 people and clean 1 server hall. If it weren't for the serious matters here, I'd start trying to come up with "how many Swedish police officers does it take to screw in a lightbulb", but I'm to annoyed to be in the mood right now.:-p

Anyway, thankfully, the case with piracy involved hasn't scared away politicians, and a political party member has contacted the Parliamentary Ombudsman part for these reasons, part for others in this controversial move (like not granting lawyer defense for one of the arrested, but still for another), and it remains to be seen whether any actions will be taken against Thomas Bodström.

Oh come on... the video from the surveillance cameras shows they took their sweet time checking out the server racks. They didn't have to take all the hardware they took (and who the fuck needs to wear camo on a raid of a server room anyway?).

The warrant was for seizing the servers hosting TPB; any seizure exceeding that was outside the scope of the warrant, and that's why they (the police and the minister of justice) are in the crapper - taking something that's outside the scope of the warrant is theft. That they covered the security cameras with garbage bags partway through just makes them look guiltier.

So - either:

the police couldn't properly identify the hardware in question, in which case they were incompetent, and should have called in someone with more expertise, or

they could, but over-reached.

they purposefully grabbed more than they were entitled to, hoping for a backlash against TPB for causing the inconvenience

Those are the only options. How much you want to bet it was #3, seeing as politicians and the **AA were involved? This is a very public cluster-fuck, and someone will have to pay, both politically and financially.

The video [youtube.com] shows that the police covers up the cameras, so they most likely wanted to hide something during the raid. And I guess that they forgot that they were in a high-security hosting facility - most likely the swedish secret police is p*ssed at them for covering the cameras.

They are liable for any damages, including downtime for legal services. They have publicly confirmed that after the raid.

And most likely they will end up paying big time. Instead of just taking TPB's servers as the warrant allowed, they took all servers hosted by the same hosting provider [www.prq.se] . Most likely to make an (illegal) example, trying to make the hosting provider go bankrupt and instill fear in other hosting providers. About 200 legitimate businesses in Sweden are down right now because of this.

He's right -- the video does indeed show the police covering up the cameras with garbage bags. Until the cameras were covered, the video doesn't show much: A bunch of guys standing around looking at the servers, chatting on a cellphone, a guy pointing around at the cameras(!), etc.

I was immediately suspicious once the cameras were covered -- I'd have thought the police (of all people) would welcome the cameras since it'd be hard proof that everything they did was on the up and up, they have video backup for when they testify in court, the defendant(s) can't claim they planted evidence, etc, etc.

When the police covers up cameras to hide their actions, that shows very clearly they know they're planning to do something questionable (if not outright illegal). In my books, that's not flamebait, that's worth investigating.

The fact they took a whole bunch of servers rather than just TPB is hardly flamebait-worthy either. It's a serious issue. Especially for the (more) legit businesses involved.

Both groundless searches and excessive destruction of property would be possible in this case; there has been no attempt whatsoever of the parties to in any way hide what they're doing, there has been public debate on the issue, there have been court cases giving credible support to the idea that linking is not infringement, everything's been open and available. Even seizing the actual pirate bay servers might be excessive, there is no grounds to suspect any destruction or tampering with evidence would be done; the parties in question do not consider their content illegal.

Basically it reeks of intimidation. Anyone around you doing something the MPAA doesnt like? Never mind if it's illegal or not, better get them to stop, or _you_ will be targeted. Collective punishment without due process.

They even took DNA from the _legal counsel_. In a possible contributory IP infringement case?? What are they going to use that for? As it has no value as evidence whatsoever, one can only assume they're planning to place it on some other crimescene or hand it to foreign intelligence. I cant think of any reasonable reason to take it, so the conclusion has to be they have some unreasonable purpose.

Remember that this is Sweden, not USA we talking about, in here the police doesn't have any more leeway when it comes to laws than normal citicens. (Ever so often we get to read about wich high up police officer got how big traffic tickets etc [the fines are based on income rather than being a fixed sum]).

So please try to remember that not every contry works the same as America (and I'm really happy that it's so, frankly America and the American mentality scares me.)

Swedish police has more leeway in Sweden then in the US because we don't have any institution to audit them. In american police (at least judging from police movies, correct me if I am wrong) it is considered improper for somebody to investigate themselves and therefore there are special police units that investigates on the actions of policemen. Here in Sweden it is the same polices doing internal investigation as all other investigation.

Also when it comes to courts. In the US you have a right to be judged by your peers (in theory, atleast). In Sweden you have the right to be judged by your politicians - remember, those same people who apparently ordered the bust (which they had no right to do, as so many others have pointed out).

The Swedish legal system is a catch 22 when it comes to govermental responsibility. The police carries out the orders from the politicians, the police investigates itself if anyone complains that their actions were illegal and if that investigation shows something was not right the politicians get to judge whether it was right or not of the police to carry out their orders.

Media coverage have so far been very good, concentrating on the mismanaged raid, suffering of other hosted servers and the fact that the raid was not in line with the popular will.

Swedish state television have also done a news report connecting US lobbying and the swedish minister of justice to the raid, which is seen as extremly bad. Several other politicians and the justice ombudsman have started investigation into the legality of the raid.

There have been numerous articles showing both sides of the story, often in the same newspaper.

The swedish national TV station (funded by every household with a TV) ran a story based on an informant, basicly saying that the minister of justice was running errands for the white house. Ordering the takedown of the pirate bay even though prosecutors had already looked into it and found that they couldn't justify a takedown. The minister of justice and his departments actions are currently being investigated.

There have been an online poll showing that about 87% think that music copying is ok. Most people also think that music piracy would go down significantly if a music CD had a resonable price.

Oddly there have been no mention what people think of actual programs and games being copied. So as far as the masses are concerned they think TPB is used only to copy music and movies.

I would like there to be an article around the fact that if TPB is found guilty of assisting copyright violations. Where do you draw the line? What about google or any other search engine? What about community sites, several cases of rape and pedophilia has been caused by connections made on such sites, are they assisting these crimes as well?

Lots of people are outraged that the police already low resources are being wasted on copyright violations when people don't want to go alone at night out of fear of rape / muggings.

I can only hope this is causing a huge scandal s Sweden as stated by the article. Can any Swedish readers provides us a synopsis of some of the reports on tv and in the newspaper?

It's not huge as of yet, but pretty big. It's not really front-page news with 20 minutes extra coverage on the evening news, yet it's definetly something the general public is aware of; and the police do not come off as the good guys in this drama. Some pretty harsh accusations have been made against the affected minister, that if

Usually when the police over here is covered in media, they are complaining about lack of funds, there are too few policemen, minor crimes go uninvestigated, and the general feeling is that the police doesn't do its job.

And now the police did a large-scale raid, not against drug smugglers, traffickers or other organized crime which people actually care about, but against file-sharers. As a result of a direct order from the minister of justice (who btw is not allowed to do that), and as a result of pressure from a foreign power.

So we have a situation where the police doesn't have manpower to do what people want, but when the US wants to shutdown a legal Swedish site, there's suddenly plenty of resources available. THIS pisses people off enormously. The average Joe couldn't care less about copyright or filesharing or the Pirate Bay, but this blatant misuse of the police is something a lot of people care about.

Usually when the police over here is covered in media, they are complaining about lack of funds, there are too few policemen, minor crimes go uninvestigated, and the general feeling is that the police doesn't do its job.

Apparently child porn creators and distributors are enjoying their freedom because of the raid.

There are very few (much less than 50) Swedish policemen with proper IT-investigation skills.

One of the more disturbing news reports relating to the PirateBay raid is that out of the 50 policemen used in the raid, several were pulled out of ongoing child porn investigations, causing these child abusers to roam free longer.

Now, that is very offensive to most civilians, as there is consensus that child porn distribution on the internet is a much more severe crime than copyright infringement of anything.

Contributory infringement has to be direct, not indirect. Pointing someone to a computer that has a chunk of a file is indirect. Giving them that chunk is direct.

The difference is important - otherwise, your electical company, your landlord if you rent/your bank if you have a mortgage, the company that made your computer, the chair you sit your ass in to type, and the boss who pays your salary so yo can afford all the shiny toys, would all be guilty of contributing to infringement, since without them you wouldn't be able to infringe the copyright. Oh, and the government as well, since they regulate the telecom industry and provide the environment that allows you to do all these things.

No, contributory infringement is inherently indirect infringement, also known as secondary liability. Maybe you're getting confused by the fact that there must be an underlying direct infringement which is contributed to.

Napster, for example, was found liable for contributory infringement because they were aware of infringements on their system (having been expressly told about them by copyright holders) but nevertheless continued to materially assist the users who were directly infringers. All Napster did was to provide a technology and and index of links, remember.

They're not alone. It's actually not that uncommon to see linking result in liability.

Pointing someone to a computer that has a chunk of a file is indirect. Giving them that chunk is direct.

Also your example fails, because giving someone a file will not be contributory infringement, it will be direct infringement, in the form of distribution.

The difference is important - otherwise, your electical company, your landlord if you rent/your bank if you have a mortgage, the company that made your computer, the chair you sit your ass in to type, and the boss who pays your salary so yo can afford all the shiny toys, would all be guilty of contributing to infringement, since without them you wouldn't be able to infringe the copyright. Oh, and the government as well, since they regulate the telecom industry and provide the environment that allows you to do all these things.

No, for two reasons. First, the law differentiates between factual causes and proximate causes. For example, let's imagine that A negligently runs a red light and hits B. B can sue A, but he can't sue A's mother. A's mother is certainly in the chain of factual causation: if she hadn't had A, A wouldn't have hit B. But she is too far removed from the car crash for liability to stand.

Second, one of the elements of contributory infringement is knowledge of the infringement at the time of the contribution. It is incredibly unlikely that any of those entities will have the slightest idea what you're doing at the time when you download something unlawfully. Therefore they're off the hook.

I think a lot of people here aren't looking at the bigger picture. Whether you like it or not, the vast majority of the international community in the western world does agree on some basic legal principles:...

... and the overarching principle in international law is the sovereignty of nations to govern their own internal affairs, set their own laws, etc. The US getting the Swedes to violate their own laws and procedures is in direct contradiction to this.

Unfortunately, the US seems to think that it can still play the superpower game, when in fact its more of a "first among equals" situation.

Remember, 95% of the planet doesn't live in the US, and isn't governed by US law or practices. With the international flow of information, etc, we can cherrypick our virtual location on a case-by-case basis. For example, want to criticize country A? Set up a server in country B. Want to criticize country B? Set up a server in country A.

Corporations have long been doing the "cherry-pick a jurisdiction" for all sorts of things, from labour to legal venue. They're pissed off because now the average Joe can and is taking the same loopholes.

Being relistic (I know, this is slashdot, so realism may be seen as extremely off topic), the whole **AA problem is the result of an industry that was, historically speaking, for most of its existence, a decentralized cottage industry, that for a short time, thanks to advances in technology over the last century, became a big, "manufacturing-type" business, and is now in danger of returning to being decentralized again thanks to further advances in tech, and people's refusal to let themselves be manipulated the way they used to be.

What are they going to do in 20 years when we don't need singers, actors, key grips, cameramen, etc.... when everything can be simulated by a hobbyist sitting at a keyboard, and when virtual worlds have more grip than a "stupid linear movie"? The answer - they won't do anything - they'll be gone.

TV, movies and music are already losing people to the net, games, etc. This is because there are still only 167 hours in a week, and every hour spent online or playing a game is an hour less to watch TV or see a movie.

On a related note, Nintendo's Wii is probably going to hurt Sony's entertainment business as a whole, as its pitched at the general population, and will drag millions more to spend more time playing rather than watching Sony's library of movie properties. The idea behind blu-ray or an hdtv player in a console is to "tie in" other forms of entertainment. People are going to vote with their wallets.

If Hollywood wants to continue to compete, they're going to have to justify their access to the consumer's most valuable resource - time. So far this year, they haven't - their movies suck to the point where even downloaders don't want to bother, its a waste of bandwidth and disk space and TIME.

Like I said, time is your most precious asset, and what they want. Ask yourself this - will movie theatres even exist 20 years from now, when the average consumer will have a 10-foot wall screen, surround sound and immersive environments where people can meet, party, and play? Or are they going to go the way of the drive-in, bulldozed to make way for housing.

The devil is in the details. In this case, "most of the western world" would probably disagree quite strongly on a) what constitutes infringement, b) how long works should be protected for and c) what the punishments should be.

For example, I doubt you'd find many people who think downloading a song that gets played ten times a day on free to air radio should be considered infringement. Similarly, you will probably not find a lot of sympathy for media companies claiming to be "suffering" from copyright infringement in the face of ever increasing profits and ever decreasing product quality.

We have footage of police wandering around, and footage of cameras with plastic bags over them. Why no footage of a policeman putting a bag over a camera? In this country, CCTV cameras are mostly arranged so that if you try to disable one, you'll be caught on camera doing it by another.

I really want a still image of a policeman putting a bag over a camera that I can distribute far and wide.

As an American who's disgusted with the current Copyright Cabal running roughshod all over everyone and everything, I'm glad there's somewhere in the world where this crap inspires the mainstream rage it should. GO GET 'EM.

What's it like in Sweden? What's a nice time of year to visit? Are there programmer jobs available? Do you still have that bikini team [wikipedia.org]?

There will be demonstrations [piratbyran.org] in Sweden's largest cities this afternoon, condeming the actions of the Swedish police and department of justice in this matter. It is being co-organized by the Pirate Party, and the youth organizations of several mainstream parties from across the political spectrum.

In Stockholm it starts at 15:00 on Mynttorget (right by parlament). That is in 15 minutes so hurry!

In Gothenburg a demonstration will start at 16:30 on Gustav Adolfs Torg.

And if you agree with what they are doing and want to support them, here [thepiratebay.org] is the donation link. SMS donations work from several countries, and makes giving a few bucks quite hassle free. I did, and feel way better than after buying a ring tone this way.

this is beginning to become a huge scandal in Sweden with coverage on TV and all newspapers 4 days in a row

And deservedly so, if the seizure is indeed comparable to trying to fight crime by bulldozing an entire law-abiding, tax-paying business district on the vague rumor that someone might probably have bought a fake brand T-shirt once from a street vendor somewhere in there.

And no matter what statistics anyone may have come up with (or forged), Bittorrent is just a highly efficient means of distributing perfectly legal stuff such as Linux releases, scientific lectures and speeches, or free renders. Much like a knife is a proven instrument for cutting food, rather than reason for suspecting an intent to kill someone.

BTW if the laws had teeth against some real ills of the information age, and if the authorities were similarly responsive, though hopefully in a more targetted way, against botnet operators perpetrating DDoS and spam, we wouldn't need to have discussions like these [slashdot.org] for more than a decade already...

which is the real lesson for the mpaa/ riaa: you don't kill this "infection", you only make is more resistant to your antibiotics

the mpaa/ riaa is breeding superpiracy

you would think that instead they would coopt the pirate bay, legitimize it

but no, they have to fight where it would be wiser to collude. they just breed a stronger foe, drive this behavior further underground, and not stop one bit of it, and just make it much more difficult to ever stop

their behavior is creating the culture of piracy. if they embraced and extended, instead of exterminate and berserk, the mpaa/ riaa would create a culture that would say "hey, this stuff is cheap, and high quality, and easily organized... why would i want to go to a bad quality copy of my media that is hard to find?"

In Chaosradio International #009 [chaosradio.ccc.de] one of the maintainers of TPB called "Peter" mentions traffic data and server capability of TPB and also comments on the Pirate Bay induced traffic on the Swedish part of the internet. According to Peter, each of the Pirate Bay high end servers handles about 20000 connections per second. This kind of packet flow once brought the main router of one of the biggest Swedish internet service providers to its knees. The traffic volume to and from the Pirate Bay actually isn't very high, just a couple of gigabits per second. The induced traffic between the peers allegedly reaches 50% of the total Swedish internet traffic. Swedes can get 1Gbps connections to their homes and don't have to pay an arm and a leg for it. 100Mbps is quite common.

The interview also covers the political environment and the internet culture of Sweden, and of course the raid.

The MPAA, US government, and Swedish police took down the The Pirate Bay website. If I told you that was about to happen, you'd probably see it as a very bad thing for bittorrent file-sharers and Swedes.

Instead, the action has been criticised in Sweden, gained the pirate party a lot more support and publicity, and the website has been put back up within about 2 days. Now it's hosted in other countries, and if any of those countries attempt to take it down, you can bet that it will again get widespread coverage in the news.

The Pirate Bay has gone from being a website into an idea. The MPAA thought they could just take it down and that would be the end of it. Instead, it seems that any attempt to take it down just gets support for file sharers and causes copyright laws to be questioned. Other countries can take it down, too, but the Swedes have set an example - there will be political backlash every time someone tries to mess with The Pirate Bay.

The torrent files that the Pirate Bay hosts are, it appears, legal in Sweden. However, the copyright infringement being perfomed by the individuals who download those torrent files and use them to make unauthorised copies of other people's work is certainly not legal in Sweden.

So, what's the likelihood that any records they may have kept of who's been committing copyright infringement are now in the hands of the Swedish police, the Antipyratbyran, and indeed the MPAA?

Pretty high, I'd say. Expect more raids soon... but this time, targetting the people who are committing the actual crimes, rather than the people who are exploiting legal loopholes to facilitate them.

But do we feel safe that we used pirate bay? It's not insane to think that the police will follow up IPs of DLing torrents and use this as "reasonable" evidence to investigate further in other countries (USA for example), then take this as far as to taking down trackers or even tracking down single IPs and sueing/arresting people.

"The MPAA has a multi-pronged approach to fighting Internet piracy, which include educating people about the consequences of piracy"
Is this going to be the old-school 'piracy == terrorism' line? I hope not; I'm look for a more SouthPark style:
'Here's X's private jet, notice anything? X used to have a Gulfstream 4, but now she's had to sell it and get a Gulfstream 3 because people like you used to download her music for free. The Gulfstream 3 doesn't even have a remote control for its surround sound DVD system. Still think downloading music for free is no big deal?'

That's interesting, they compare the popularity of thepiratebay.org (21st in Sweden by Alexa), with CNN.com (125th in Sweden, Alexa). Color me surprised: a swedish site is more popular in sweden than an american site.

incredibly expensive shows like 24 and Lost WON'T EXIST if they can't make money

Welcome to the world of tomorrow! They'll adapt their business model eventually, and they'll start making shows available online. Or they'll keep their hands clamped over their ears and shout "LALALALA!" louder and louder until they go out of business. You're one of these people who thinks that it's the customer's duty to give a shit about producers, and that's just not the way it's supposed to work.

and you entirely missed his point. Which was: either those shows can begin to provide the content online for people who want to download it and watch it on a computer, or they can lose their ass to piracy. Most people are willing to watch a few commercials if they can download the show they want, when they want it.

Not everyone, myself included, has time to be at their TV everyday at a given hour to watch their favorite show. I hate to break it to you, the studios aren't making any money when people Tivo either. I suppose next you'll tell us all how horrible it is when people skip the commercials using their Tivo? They can adapt their model, or they can die. Someone somewhere along the line will figure out how to provide those "expensive" shows on demand, and they'll reap the benifits. If not the current regime, then whoever replaces them. Stop being so naive and stop eating all the shit the **AA throws on your plate.

Wow...you sure completely missed his point. Yes, they'll adapt their business models, to only produce those kind of shows that can make money even when widely pirated. His point is that this class of shows will include fewer, if any, good shows.

I'm not exactly sure he missed the point. The central expression is "good shows". "Good" by what definition? Is he worried that humankind will not see the n+1st season of 24, x years from now? Or that he won't? I just fail to see the link between countable commercial success and some ill-defined, subjective definition of "quality" if applied to entertainment. Just look at what shallow, voyeuristic crap your general-prupose, mind-wasting TV program mostly consists of today. No imaginable change could make that much worse, in my opinion. But maybe someone can tell me why shows that have been designed with ~100% piracy in mind must under any and all circumstances be worse than those today?

TV and movies are not like music, where the artists make most of their money outside of sales of the music

How very shortsighted. Is this another law written into stone, not subjectable to change? An actor's public image is determined mainly by what role(s) he plays and what he says and does in public outside of movies, and not primarily by how much money his movies make. Of course, if an actor doesn't rake in cash with his movies, he won't play in many movies, but if NO movie makes box office money (assuming ~100% piracy), then the playing field is level again. Just think of how much money is made through merchandise. Of course, merchandising does by far not work for any movie, but as a matter of fact, the most succesful movies in term of box office nowadays are all movies with lots of merchandising potential (Star Wars, Matrix, LotR, Harry Potter, Spiderman, X-Men, etc. etc.). The actor can furthermore capitalize on his/her success in various other areas involving public appearance. Think of something, I'm getting tired of laying it down.

Piracy fails the "what if everyone did it?" test.

Examples like Apple's iTunes' success (and most TV consumers' laziness, btw) show that this scenario will remain what it is today: an industry scarecrow far from reality. There are (or could be) just so many more aspects to a movie or music CD than just retail price. If you can't compete on price alone, get ahead on other aspects. It's really simple, and does not even require a fundamental change of business model. This whole war of *AA vs. The World is nothing but the industry's struggle for a price monopoly irretrievably lost to file sharing. Now it's real competition, not just the pseudo-competition of Sony Music vs. Warner Records or Paramount vs. New Line Cinema.

In conlusion: Don't paint the future so bleak, it's just not going to be as bad as you might think. Don't just take current trends and extrapolate them without boundaries, you will almost certainly overshoot. There are too many economic realities which will persist even in the remote future. To change them, a fundamental economic change would have to happen as well.

5) Slashdot sucks, because most people here don't see the immorality of file sharing, and don't see that incredibly expensive shows like 24 and Lost WON'T EXIST if they can't make money. We might actually be seeing the fall of good video programming. It may not exist in 10 years, except for amateur junk.

You were pretty good up to this point...

And I must say I support file sharing exactly for this reason.

I want mass media to die an ugly death!

Lost to me (although better than most other crap they put on television) still represents what makes me ill about television. Maybe I'm just bitter over "Enteprise's" failure or the cancelation of "Firefly" but I am disgusted by most cookie cutter music and lame stories that make no sense and waste millions of dollars to make movies and TV shows that are unoriginal and could be made by an ad lib script.

The only thing I bother today is Adult Swim on Cartoon network because of the imported Anime... Heck... My movie collection is nothing but foreign films because some reason... When you don't have kiss butt to a hollywood director and fix script problems with CGI and million dollar actors... You are forced to make entertainment the hard way. (Which is why I love fan fics remakes of star trek).

If these moguls lost quit making emo boy bands and crap movies... The world would be a better place.

If no one made money from art, then only true artists would make art... Plain and simple. Of course they'd be starving and need patrons like they did in the Middle Ages, but Da Vinci made quite a living without the need for copyrights of his work.

Maybe I'm an art house bourgeois uppity bastard who only like foreign films, but I'd like for one day in my life to be able to turn on the radio or TV and see something that is more than just "entertainment". I'd like to see art.

1) TPB sucks, because they're just leechers making money off of other people's copyrighted work, all the while disengenuously crowing about "freedom".

I suppose Used Booksellers are leeches in your eyes as well. Should we shut them down too?

incredibly expensive shows like 24 and Lost WON'T EXIST if they can't make money.

How does filesharing substantially hurt 24 and Lost? The shows have already aired and made their money by the time they get onto filesharing sites.

Honestly, if networks and cable companies would get together and allow rebroadcasting on demand of major shows, the vast majority of people would simply do that if they missed a broadcast. Or they could allow downloading of the show off their website, complete with commercials, in a time-limited "secure" format that would expire, say, a month after initial broadcast date, so as not to interfere with DVD sales. Most downloaders would probably go for something in pristine quality that would be easy to locate and download, over the dubious quality of an anonymous fileshare.

Anyway, the point is that this is not about making money. There are plenty of ways for them to make money off the internet with their shows, as they are beginning to discover. This is about control. The suits have shown over and over again that they resist any attempt to lessen their total control over the distribution of their product, even when it can make money for them. They have to be dragged kicking and screaming every step of the way.

The bottom line is this: copyright infringement DOES cause serious problems. It causes money not to go to shows/movies/etc. It causes creative ventures to be cancelled. It causes people to lose jobs (not just the stars who have money -- people like the crew that have little).

It's actually the copyright in the first place that causes the problems. It creates an unnecessary cartel of employment and jobs that hurts the rest of society. Art used to be about performance before the copyright cartel, and most of the works of art that people consider great were created under that system, not under the copyright system. Many of us believe, with well developed reasons, that the world would be better off without any copyright.

Yes, some jobs will be impacted. Jobs that needn't have existed in the first place, and that are essentially leeches upon the rest of us, like most lawyers.

Other jobs will be created, and in the balance, all of us will be better off.

I am supporting them as an effective pressure group to bring copyright law back in line with the desires of the people. Personally, as a commie, I'd rather see copyright being abolished outright, but for something more realistic, the Pirate Party programme (5-year copyright term, noncommercial copying unrestricted) sounds just about right to me.